


Sunsprite

by Eloisa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-07 00:11:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/424734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloisa/pseuds/Eloisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Renly Baratheon made one visit to Sunspear in his mid-teens. Now he is back, with his squire Loras in tow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunsprite

The air in Sunspear’s narrow great hall smelt of sweat, turmeric and candle-wicks.  Conversation wafted like fading firelight beneath the harpist’s music.  Oberyn Martell sipped his wine and surveyed the room with wry pleasure.

Arianne had ordered a dinner fit for a king, let alone the younger brother of a usurper.  Piquant spices and yoghurt on the meat dishes, oranges and lemons to dress the vegetables, sweet almond pastries, flatbreads studded with cloves – Dornish dishes, food suited to the blazing summer, food that might remind their guests just how far from home they were.

Oberyn glanced to his right.  Arianne sat beyond her parents’ symbolically empty chairs, with Lord Renly on her right hand.  What they discussed Oberyn could not hear, but as she gestured to illustrate a point, her figure-clinging Dornish gown swayed across her lush bosom.  Her skin almost gleamed in the candlelight.  Renly nodded politely, ventured a comment and held up his goblet for his squire to refill.

“Watch,” Oberyn murmured to Ellaria, on his left.

“I am watching.”  She scarcely moved her lips as she spoke; she was too busy smiling to the northern lord down the table from her.  “She plays a dangerous game.”

“Less so than you think, maybe.”  He watched Renly’s squire, attentive at his lord’s elbow, and wondered.  Loras Tyrell: Willas’s brother, nine years his junior.  _Quite beautiful_ , Oberyn thought.  The soft brown curls and porcelain complexion would not have disgraced a maiden, yet his face and wiry figure were unmistakeably masculine.

Oberyn sipped his wine and smirked into the goblet.  There was a fine jest in here somewhere, if he could but find it.

*

The heat had made the children fretful enough to frighten away their nursemaid.  Dinners and entertainments and false kings’ brothers were just more fences to jump, but three- and five-year-olds were an altogether more difficult proposition.

“’Nother story?” Loreza said hopefully.

 Oberyn sighed.  “Once there were two little snakes called Dorea and Loreza, who stayed awake until midnight and were eaten by the Ice Dragon –”  His youngest daughter squeaked in protest.  “You are misbehaving.  Sarella told you a story and I told you two more.  You need to sleep.”

 “It’s too hot,” Dorea grumbled.  She wriggled under her bed’s satin sheet.  “Too hot to be tired.”

 The door creaked.  Oberyn looked round without rising from the edge of Loreza’s bed.  Tyene smiled down at him and her youngest sisters.  “It’s so hot tonight, I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d come and say hello.  Would you like me to sing you a song?”

 “Yes, please!” Loreza chirped.

 Oberyn kissed her black-haired brow and rose.  “You be sure to thank Tyene when she’s finished singing.  Good night.”

 “Good night, Father,” the little ones chorused.  Tyene winked at him as he departed.

 A combination of the day’s heat and the profusion of candles lighting the dining hall had left Oberyn feeling unpleasantly stale.  Instead of going straight from the Tower of the Sun to the Spear Tower, he descended to the ground floor and the bathhouse.

 Doran had installed communal bathtubs some years previously at Mellario’s instigation.  They’d proved a popular addition to Sunspear, in a number of ways, although Ellaria sometimes found it difficult to enter the bathhouse without giggling.

 The only other person bathing tonight was young Loras Tyrell.  “Good evening,” Oberyn greeted him from the door.  The boy sat up straight in his bathtub and stared.  Oberyn snagged a towel from the chest near the door.  “How do you like Sunspear so far?”

 “It is a pleasant place,” Loras answered stiffly.  “I am pleased to be here with my lord.”

Oberyn tossed his towel onto a bench by Loras’s tub and started to strip.  “Yes; your lord.  I trust he found the dinner dishes as palatable as he pretended.”

 “He found them – interesting.  Didn’t you pass him on the stairs?”

 “I was in the other tower, with my younger daughters.”  He climbed into Loras’s bathtub, watched the boy inch away from him.

 “Oh.  I thought –”  He stopped.

 Oberyn raised an eyebrow.  “Thought I’d been with my paramour?”

 He fidgeted.  “Well, if you’re only going to get hot and sweaty again afterwards, I’m surprised you make the effort to bathe.”

 “That would be grossly impolite to Ellaria.  I take politeness in the presence of a lady to be paramount.”  Loras looked set to sniff.  Oberyn settled back in the water.  _Such an impudent sapling._   “Bathing.  Lord Renly was bathing with you, I assume?”

 “I am his squire,” Loras answered in a voice like frozen sherbet.  “It is customary for a squire to assist his lord in the bath.”

 Oberyn laughed aloud.  “I’m sure he appreciated it.  Tell me: which of you fucked the other?”

 Loras flushed scarlet and stood up.  Oberyn caught his wrist as he made to scramble out of the tub.  “Gently.  I didn’t give you leave to go.”

 “My father warned me about you,” he snapped.

”The great Mace Tyrell.  I’m sure he did.”  A quick yank on Loras’s arm, and the boy sploshed inelegantly into the tub.  Oberyn stood up and surveyed him.  “I’d love to say Willas warned me about you, but he didn’t: I think he’s quite fond of you.”  He shook his head.  “It’s a good thing he’s the heir.  He’s got strength of character.”

 Loras’s cheeks had gone from angry red to ivory-pale.  “If my prince has finished insulting me, may I leave?”

 “Are you sure you want to go?”  He slid his free hand into the water and laid it on Loras’s cock.  It went from semi-hard to hard under his touch.  Oberyn laughed.  “Oh, to be young and virile.”

 “Let me go,” the squire whispered.

 “Hmm.”  Oberyn pretended to consider it.  “No.”

 Loras wriggled to his feet and backed an inch away from him into the tub’s wall.  The water came halfway up Oberyn’s thighs; Loras, smaller, was almost groin-deep in it.  “R-Renly –”

 “Think he’ll be offended?”  Oberyn idly cupped Loras’s balls in his hand.  “Doubtless he has a great affection for you.  Enough to teach you a lot of interesting things.”  The boy’s blush deepened.  “How to put that beautiful mouth to use –”  A flash of incomprehension.  Oberyn laughed.  “Not?  Oh, let me show you.”

 “You –”

“Stay where you are,” he ordered, and he knelt down in the water.  “You want to learn, don’t you?”

 “I –”  He gasped as Oberyn licked the topmost slit of his cock.  “Oh –”

 “This is how it’s done,” he murmured to the boy.  “Slowly – root to tip –”  He ran his mouth up the squire’s length, noting every tiny gasp he made.  “Careful with your teeth –”  He nipped Loras’s foreskin, just enough to elicit a squeak, not enough to hurt.  “And –”  He lowered his mouth fully onto the boy’s cock.

For a minute or two he did little but work his mouth around Loras’s cock and listen to the boy’s moans of pleasure above him.  This wouldn’t take long, if he permitted it to continue.  Time to remind Loras which of them was in charge.  He lifted his head to take a breath.  “But always remember –”  He took over half of Loras’s cock into his mouth and withdrew.  “– that this is a gift not given lightly.”  He leant back against the tub’s far wall, snagged a scrubbing brush and started to scour himself clean.

 Loras stared at him.  Incomprehension slowly gave way to desert-hot fury.  He vaulted out of the tub, yanked on his tunic and breeches without drying himself first, stepped into his boots and stormed out of the bathing room with his erect cock barely hidden beneath his clothing.  Oberyn restrained a laugh.

 He washed at a leisurely pace and took the time to dry and dress himself properly before mounting the Spear Tower staircase.  It was, as he had said to Loras, only polite.

A few candles in glinting silver holders stood around Ellaria’s bedchamber.  Oberyn paused in the doorway and inhaled the mingling scents there: orange blossom that infused the candle wax, sandalwood and jasmine from the clothing closets.

 “This room smells so civilised,” he murmured.

He heard more than saw Ellaria turn over in bed.  “Thank you, my prince.  Where were you?”

 He closed the door and approached her broad, low bed.  “Seducing Lord Renly’s squire.”

 “What?”  She sat up and thrust off the sheet.  “Why didn’t you bring him up here?”

 Oberyn laughed as he pulled off his robe.  “I believe, my darling, that you would have cramped his style.”

 “Ah.”  In the near-dark he just saw her smile.  “Do tell what happened.”

 He kissed her and ran a hand between her legs.  She’d applied the jasmine perfume down there too.  “Well –”

*

Sunspear’s training hall was inside the thick-walled keep, protected from the sun.  Tiny slitted windows provided some air while letting in as little heat as possible.  Even so, it was normally stifling by mid-morning, and wearing armour inside was barely tolerable.

 Oberyn left Ellaria’s bed before dawn and trained in the brief witch-light hour when the day’s heat was yet to strike its first blow.  He had already completed his daily practice and bathed in the hall’s cold tub before the majority of the northern knights arrived.

 He stood in the shadows and watched their drills.  So uncomfortable, they must be: heavy mail, plate and padding, as impractical in this heat as their court garb.  All those thick brocades and tight silks made him want to question their sanity aloud, and this was worse.

 One of the northmen had been sensible enough to wear half-mail and leather – the slenderest of the bunch, with chestnut curls spilling from the back of his helm.  Squire Loras was sparring with Ser Daemon Sand.  Their tourney swords licked each other amid tumbling sparks and kissed the air where they met.  The Bastard of Godsgrace had several inches on young Tyrell, as well as several years, but the boy was fast and nimble.  He’d learnt a few tricks as well, Oberyn realised, tracing the sequence of blows and parries.  Perhaps there was something under there –

 Loras glanced up, met his eyes and froze in place.  Ser Daemon broke through his guard and dealt him a sharp crack on the helm.  Loras staggered.  Oberyn smiled to himself as he walked out of the training hall.  No strength of character.

*

“Lord Renly is too much the northerner,” Oberyn heard Arianne complain to Tyene just inside the ladies’ solar halfway up the Spear Tower.  “The heat is practically prostrating him.  How am I meant to seduce him in this weather?”

 “You could seduce anyone,” Tyene consoled.

 “Last time he visited –”

“Last time, you were both children.  Maybe now he’ll be a little more receptive.”

 Oberyn frowned as he continued up the stairs.  It wasn’t like Tyene to lack perceptiveness, but it was similarly unlike her to mislead Arianne.  The two were as close as the Moonmaid and her curtain.

 She’d been right about one thing, though; it was too hot for _anything_.  The summer had turned Dorne into a blazing hellscape.  The heat was a discrete presence within Sunspear, like a vengeful ghost that pried unasked into every corner, choking and suffocating whatever it found there.  At midday it addled a man’s mind until he saw things that were not there and smelt or heard the impossible.

Oberyn suddenly longed for Ellaria’s cool hands and silk-soft touch: just to lie beside her, companionable and quiet, until the afternoon forge-heat had lifted.  He longed for the Water Gardens, with its pools, the shade of its fruit trees, and Doran’s quiet company.

Light footsteps on the stairs distracted him from his reverie.  He looked up to see one of the Sunspear pages hurrying down towards him.  The boy bowed: “My prince, Lord Renly sends his greetings and begs that you will join him for a goblet of wine in his chambers.”

Now, _there_ was a surprise.  “Tell him I will be pleased to wait on him.”  As the page scurried back up the tower, Oberyn, thirty years older and wiser, slowly climbed up after him.

Renly had scarcely exchanged a word with him in the two days he’d been here, other than to exchange official greetings from his brother.

_So long as the wine is Dornish, I have no objections to make._

Renly’s apartments were on the same floor as Arianne’s, something that had not been lost on the princess even if its significance had bypassed the lord.  Nym, in the guise of courtly prattle, had told Oberyn earlier of the efforts Arianne had made to gain admittance to Renly’s chamber the previous evening.  He’d doubtless been otherwise engaged.

One of Renly’s own servants bowed Oberyn through the door into the receiving room.  Another was setting wine – the deep red wine of Dorne – on a table near the window.

“Prince Oberyn.  So glad you could join me.”  Renly emerged from the curtained doorway that led to his bedchamber.  His smile was genial and his bow of greeting was adequate.  “Is Sunspear always so warm, in summer?”

“Oh, yes.  The length of this summer is the only unusual feature.”  Oberyn settled into one of the sun-cushioned chairs at the table.  “I advise you not to go into the interior.  Where the coastal breezes no longer freshen the air – it’s like walking into a dragon’s mouth.”

“And about as hazardous an enterprise, I don’t doubt.”  Renly sat down opposite Oberyn.  “Your deserts are harsh and unforgiving.  Filled with poisonous snakes, I hear.”  He took a cherry from the bowl on the table and began to nibble it.

“Snakes seldom bother me.”

“Doubtless not.”  Loras Tyrell appeared at his lord’s elbow and poured out some of the wine.  Oberyn glanced past the boy.  The other servants had withdrawn.  _Hmm._   Renly tasted his cup with appreciation on his face.  “Your wines suit your country, my prince.”

“Harsh and unforgiving?”

“And they do not go sour when warmed.”  It shouldn’t have been possible for _anyone_ to eat a cherry in quite such a suggestive manner.  Oberyn tried not to cross his eyes, or his legs.  “All Sunspear seems uniquely adapted to the heat – even the bathhouse.  Matchless.  Isn’t it, Loras?”

“Oh, yes,” the squire said.  There was a smile in the boy’s eyes as he looked down at his lord.  “It’s amazing what one learns in the Sunspear bathhouse.”

Oberyn tried to restrain his grin.  Somehow he kept it down to a smirk.  He sipped his wine: it was lighter than some reds, with an aftertaste of apples, but definitely a superior vintage.  “The test of any lesson, of course, is how well one can replicate the activity afterwards.”

Loras’s smile resembled a sun-kissed rose.  “Shall I demonstrate, my prince?”

“Ellaria,” Oberyn murmured, “is going to feel _very_ left out.”  He downed his wine and set the goblet aside.  “Please do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Now put “sunsprite” into Google Images. :)


End file.
